They are fairly consistent that, whatever the Federation’s official policy, people needed money, had money, and they must have got it from somewhere. Those Tribbles weren’t free (except for Uhura’s free sample! 
) Or, for another example, Picard had a nice estate and enough cash to hire La Sirena for a shitload of money on short notice, while his strung-out former officer was living in a trailer.
To avoid more hijack of this thread I started a new thread on Star Trek’s economy (I think it is an interesting topic):
I thought that only Ensign Harry Kim fell into that category.
I doubt that… Like I was saying above, most of your junior enlisted people would have been promoted multiple times in a seven year period, with only the P01s and CPOs maybe not being promoted in that time frame.
Unless Voyager was somehow special, their crew would be mostly composed of junior and mid-level enlisted. By way of comparison, your Constellation class frigate has a crew of 200- 24 officers and 176 enlisted. Burke class destroyers have 23 officers and 300 enlisted, with 25-28 Chief Petty Officers. Voyager’s crew of 200 would likely be very similar.
As I mentioned just a bit upthread (posts #49 and #53), Star Trek’s rank structure has never been consistent. Gene Roddenberry famously said that everyone on the Enterprise (in The Original Series era) was an officer. But that was never established on-screen in the show itself, and there’s some internal evidence indicating that at least some of the crew we see are enlisted.
In The Next Generation era, Starfleet definitely has enlisted, most famously Chief Petty Officer O’Brien. But even then, in his first appearance, he was wearing officer’s pips, and only in later appearances had an enlisted rank insignia. There are mentions here and there in TNG and DS9 of Starfleet enlisted, but other than O’Brien, every major Starfleet character we see is an officer, and almost all of the bit players, as well.
I was never a big Voyager fan, so I’m probably not remembering correctly, but I don’t recall any enlisted characters at all on Voyager.
Starfleet mirrors the historic U.S. Navy, particularly in the Age of Sail, in some ways. But only kinda-sorta. There’s clearly no up-or-out policy, for example. And promotions clearly work very differently. Not to mention oddities like Wesley’s “Acting Ensign” rank…
The various iterations of Star Trek have never been clear on how their officer and enlisted ranks work, or how many of each there are on a ship. From the on-screen evidence, though, Starfleet ships at the very least have a much higher proportion of officers than any real-world naval vessel.
She was an admiral in Nemesis.
At best, you’d have something along the lines of the “standing crew”, which would be the people who literally run, fly, and fight the ship, and then you’d likely have “mission crew” which would vary with the mission that the ship would be on- if it was a military mission, it might be Starfleet Marines, or extra phaser crews, or whatever. A lot of the time, it would probably be science personnel or first contact personnel.
I could see mission crews having a lot of specialized roles which might have officer ranks out of courtesy, much like lawyers, doctors, etc… are given officer ranks in the present-day military.
But it doesn’t really make sense to just have more officers without a good reason- the whole point is that officers are formally granted a commission; i.e. a legal document commissioning them to carry out the will and orders of their government/sovereign with the legal authority to do so. The commission also requires inferior officers and enlisted personnel to obey their lawful orders. The role of officers is to command, and only in certain limited circumstances are certain professional members given officer ranks out of courtesy.
O’Brien was more a victim of sloppy and not well considered writing. It would make sense that he might be a CPO or even a warrant officer if he’s the transporter chief, assuming that’s some sort of specialized and skilled position.
Yes, I understand how officers and enlisted work in the real world. However, Starfleet is fictional, and the TV series and movies just have never been clear or consistent on how Starfleet’s fictional rank structure works. And the parallels to real world militaries were only ever very vague approximations.
And, for that matter, even in the real world, two the U.S.'s uniformed services, the United States Public Health Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, only have commissioned officers and no enlisted.
And, yes, O’Brien definitely was the victim of sloppy and not well considered writing. But that’s true of Starfleet’s rank structure in general.
I’m not sure it would necessarily be OK under the collected “Rules of War”, given that you could end up “deputising” or “commissioning” someone who was ineligible and cause all sorts of headaches about whether the commands they gave were legal or authorised etc.
For example, what if the person you commissioned wasn’t even a citizen of the country?
I can see it possibly working under an extreme emergency situation (eg zombie apocalypse and the remnants of the military in the area are “commissioning” the handful of civilian survivors to ensure they will be evacuated/able to access supplies) where stuff like The Rules Of War is less important in the moment than “Well that person has an army officer’s uniform on, I better listen to them”, though.
It does raise the question of what a ‘commission’ is. If you are appointed to officer rank by a superior officer, by definition that’s a warrant officer.
At the start of the American civil war, many militia officers were elected. It would have been most unusual for a regular Army officer to appoint a non-officer to officer status, because the Army officers believed, in their hearts, that civilians weren’t qualified to be officers … However, there must be some record of an elected officer appointing at least one person to be a junior officer.
No, not necessarily. As has been previously established in this thread, sometimes the fount of commissions (in the USA, the president) delegates his authority to other officers. When one of these delegates exercises that authority, that’s a real commission (though depending on the circumstances it may need to be confirmed later by those with even higher ranks, or by the fount him/herself).
Sure, Voyager had enlisted crewmembers, including those who were originally Starfleet and not Maquis. An example would be Crewman Tal Celes, who appears in two episodes and actually discusses her training and career.
Well, as I said, I was never a big fan, and I was probably not remembering correctly. Thanks for the correction.
So, there were definitely enlisted on board Voyager. We don’t know how many. Since the series focused on the senior officers, it’s possible that most of the characters we see in the background are enlisted, but the proportion of officers to enlisted don’t really seem to mirror those @bump was citing for real world naval vessels.
That Memory Alpha link also raises more questions about what the distinction between “enlisted” and “officer” even is in Starfleet. Crewman Celes apparently has dialogue about her enlisted courses at Starfleet Academy. So, if enlisted and officers both attend the Academy, what’s the difference? Maybe the enlisted term is only two years and focuses on specialized technical training, and the officer term is four years and has more general education? But that’s a fan wank.
Yeah, probably writers thinking of Starfleet Academy less like Annapolis and more like one of our large State University systems that incorporates everything from community colleges to postgrad research institutes (said writers having had their closest familiarization with any sort of military organization involve Tom Cruise). But really Roddenberry planted the seeds for all this with his accustomed utopianism by including the “they’re all officers and the lowest slicksleeve is an ensign” guidance in the TOS writers’ guidebook. He was a veteran so he knew the operational difference, but what he was aiming for was erasing the class difference between officers and enlisted, and the easiest way he saw was by unifying it all.
Might I request that we keep this thread more about how the real world works (which is what the OP asked), and less about how Star Trek ranks work (which we’ve already established doesn’t make much sense)?
Oops. Right, GQ. I apologize for the highjack.
Going back to the actual subject:
It’s my understanding that in U.S. service all commissioned officers are granted their commissions by the President of the United States, but in practice the vast majority are commissioned and promoted by delegation. The President doesn’t personally sign all the commissions of each individual service academy graduate.
On the other hand, warrant officers hold their warrant from the service secretary (Secretary of the Army for the Army, Secretary of the Navy for the Navy and Marine Corps, and Secretary of the Air Force for the Air Force). But, again, in practice the vast majority receive their warrants and promotions by delegated authority. (Technically, the Secretary of Defense and the President also have the authority to issue warrants, but this is rare to the point of non-existence).
So, it’s at least theoretically possible that a ship’s captain might have the delegated authority to issue a limited “acting” commission to a civilian.
I think a lot of it comes back to haphazard and frankly sloppy writing. I mean, I get that on a show like the Star Trek shows, enlisted crew members aren’t “cool”, in the sense that the bridge crew & Captain are. So they’re relegated to the background in-show.
But someone’s still got to unclog the warp toilet, stand watch in Engineering, load the torpedo tubes, swab the decks (or whatever cleaning is required on a Starfleet ship), etc… That’s stuff typically done by the enlisted crew- the officers are the commanders and decision makers, with both the legal authority and the responsibility.
Roddenberry making “everyone an officer” was probably some sort of half-baked attempt to imply that Starfleet was somehow different than Earth navies. Maybe he was getting at some sort of unified rank structure without the distinction of commissions; maybe somehow they’re all “commissioned” by virtue of their oath of office, education, and position in some kind of way that doesn’t really have an analog on modern-day Earth. But that doesn’t really make them “all officers”, it just means that commissions as we understand them have changed/become less relevant.
But even at that, the difference between a specific command/leadership set of people and technical specialists is still vital. It’s not workable to have expected your ship captains to have worked their way up from recruit, even if there’s no official officer/enlisted divide. You’ll still have your junior command specialists starting out with authority over others, even if their pay grades differ, and even if the ship captain and the technical specialists are the same “rank”, the captain will still have to have the statutory authority to tell the other people what to do, even if it’s only by virtue of his billet.
So just by the nature of running such an organization, you’re going to end up with something similar to an officer/enlisted divide, even if it’s not a legal thing.
Casimir Pulaski was an interesting story during the US Revolution. “…On August 20, he met Washington in his headquarters in Neshaminy Falls, outside Philadelphia.[22] He showed off riding stunts, and argued for the superiority of cavalry over infantry.[20] Because Washington was unable to grant him an officer rank, Pulaski spent the next few months traveling between Washington and the United States Congress in Philadelphia, awaiting his appointment…”
“…As a result, on September 15, 1777, on the orders of Congress, Washington made Pulaski a brigadier general in the Continental Army cavalry…”
Washington, as the leader of the Army, couldn’t commission him as a general until he received orders from the Congress.
That’s an interesting case.
I will note that this happened in 1777, 10 years before the Constitution was ratified, and 203 years before 10 U.S. Code § 531 was enacted, so not quite applicable to how commissions are handled in the U.S. military today…
However, this did spark me to look at the actual law:
Under current U.S. law, the President has the authority to issue original commissions for ranks of second lieutenant, first lieutenant, and captain in the Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps, and ensign, lieutenant (junior grade) and lieutenant in the Navy. Original commissions to the rank of major or above (lieutenant commander or above in the Navy) require the advice and consent of the Senate.
Under Executive Order 13384, the President delegates the power to originate commissions for junior officers to the Secretary of Defense, but interestingly forbids the Secretary of Defense from further delegating this authority.
The U.S. Army alone commissions more than 6,000 officers a year, so I can’t imagine either the President or the Secretary of Defense is individually signing all of those commissions; they must be signing lists. But it appears only the President or SecDef could sign such a list.
In any event, under current U.S. law, it seems as if the President and the Secretary of Defense could issue field commissions as junior officers at their own discretion, but no one else could.
10 U.S. Code § 531 (b) also requires that original commissions be issued in accordance with 10 U.S. Code § 533 and regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Defense. 10 U.S. Code § 533 lays out various “credits” towards determining initial rank, rank in grade, and service in grade, based on prior service, education, and training. Beyond that, we’d have to look at current DoD regulations on initial commissions to see if the President and SecDef can actually issue field commissions to random civilians.
I suspect the regulations specify requirements such that a teenager with no advanced education wouldn’t be eligible, but it’s possible the wording might technically allow it.
ETA: all of the above only applies to the current U.S. military, of course. Other militaries will have their own procedures, of course, and the U.S. military may well have had quite different commissioning procedures in the past.